by Amy Lane
Oh God… he knew that voice. Recently. Where…?
“Mr. Desarno, you’re going to be a little disoriented, okay?”
He knew that voice. Where… where…? He blinked, and his teacher’s brain kicked in.
Adult education, last year. She’d been in her twenties, and fragile. He remembered that she’d been so… on the verge of just not showing up, just not earning her GED, just not being a part of the world at all. Twenty-three years old, and she was just ready to disappear.
“Gina?” His voice was still too loud in his ears. “Gina Victorine?”
“Mr. Desarno! Thank the Goddess! You changed! You were dying, right, and I remembered you, right? And Adrian was taking me flying, and… we couldn’t just let you, you know? We couldn’t just let you die.”
The blond-haired man with the whirling eyes who’d been sucking Marcus’s blood sat up and gave them both an insouciant grin. “Well, technically, luv, he is dead.”
Marcus stared at him, and the man gently placed Marcus’s hand on his own throat.
Nothing happened. Nothing moved. Nothing pumped, breathed, or twitched.
He was dead. Dead, naked, and covered in blood.
“Mr. Desarno, you’re going to be all right, okay?”
Marcus blinked. He was going to be all right? Or he was going to be dead? One thing was certain.
“All things considered, Gina,” he said slowly, “I think it’s better if you call me Marcus.”
A Ten-Year Vampire Primer
GINA VICTORINE had apparently found herself—or at least a family to take care of her. It was unfortunate that she’d been found when she was half-dead of an overdose, but Adrian—the blond man who had pulled Marcus over into the vampire world—had helped her out as well.
Gina and Adrian had been the best mentors a newly fledged vampire could have.
It was terrifying, at first. Marcus was a gentle person, a history teacher, a baseball coach for his nephew’s team, a suitor so bashful he’d dated his girlfriend for nearly six months before he’d gotten laid.
The first time he ripped Adrian’s jeans off his body to gobble his cock and suck blood from his thigh was about five minutes after Gina and Adrian got him back to their home, Green’s hill, and got him out of the shower.
He was a naturally curious person, so he should have been worried about the house (dug into the side of the hill, with a wraparound window facing out from three-quarters of the hill and the “darkling”—the vampires’ quarters, which were completely covered in earth—taking the other quarter), but he wasn’t. He should have registered that his room—complete with a shower cubicle with a curtain in the corner and a big sturdy bed in the middle—was almost like a padded vault as opposed to a real guest room, but that wasn’t what he was curious about either.
What he was curious about was… flesh. The throbbing of it. The slickness of the skin over it. The blood… glorious blood… fabulous blood… delicious blood… pumping underneath and through it.
The next thing he knew, he had a mouthful of Adrian’s thigh, and Adrian was coming on his ear.
And Marcus was mortified. He’d stepped out of the shower, had a towel around his hips, and was trying to come to grips with the fact that what should have been a cold shower didn’t really bother him that much, and then Adrian had stuck his head into the bathroom and said, “You okay, mate?” in that lovely cockney accent of his, and then….
Well, Marcus needed another shower. He’d come all over his towel.
Adrian explained it to him a little later because one shower turned to two, and then three, and then Adrian had brought in a young man with a lovely warm body, and Adrian explained that he was a shape-shifter, and he didn’t mind being gnawed on or fucked into oblivion because his blood supply replenished quickly. Marcus’s attention wandered, and the young man had looked so lovely, and Adrian handed him a bottle of lube, and suddenly Marcus’s cock completely took over. And only then, after the young man was panting and dilated and laughing in reaction and a little pale from blood loss, did Marcus think he could hold a thought in his befuddled head.
The tall, blond-headed vampire climbed naked into bed with him. Marcus should have been embarrassed but, considering all of the other things that had happened to him and that he had done that night, was not.
“What you have to understand, mate,” the man said soothingly, stroking his hand down Marcus’s back as he clutched his pillow to his chest for comfort, “is that you’re like a big baby with a sex drive. You want to eat, you want to fuck, and not much else is going on up there.” Adrian tapped Marcus’s head through his curly black hair. Italian—everything about him was Italian, from his olive skin to his dark eyes and regularly plucked unibrow.
“But…,” Marcus muttered. “But… men, Adrian. I’ve never in my life….”
He’d just fed—a lot—and he would learn that the full-body blush that coated him would only happen when he was full of other people’s blood.
“Shhhh…,” Adrian whispered, soothing his shoulders and generally showing Marcus physical kindness. “I get it, mate. The thing is, Gina tells me you’re a gentleman. A good guy. A nice man. I’ll be honest. Until you’re over this blood-madness thing, you’re only going to see men in this room, and I’ll tell you why.”
Marcus pulled out of his misery and the strange lethargy that was hitting him as dawn approached, and he turned his head. He noted—in a purely objective way—that Adrian had the most blessedly blue, sky-spangled eyes Marcus had ever seen.
“Why?” Marcus asked somnolently, wondering what those eyes would look like behind him as Adrian buried himself in Marcus’s flesh. His cock stirred, interested, and for a moment his body was paralyzed with indecision—the approaching sleep or one more bout of… of… lust.
“Because you are a gentleman,” Adrian told him, his eyes going from blue to that alert red Marcus had first seen. “You’re a nice guy, and the guilt for what you would do to a woman—even if she’s willing—I’ve seen it drive some blokes mad.”
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Marcus mumbled, and Adrian nodded.
“Oh yes. And the women here are mostly shape-shifters or vampires—they’re tough. But you—” Adrian tapped his bare chest. “You’re a kind man, Marcus. You’ve got that thing in your head that wouldn’t forgive yourself for fucking a girl bloody. No—your body is on high alert, and all it wants is to feed and to fuck, mostly at the same time. You’ll be more comfortable if you’re with someone you feel could fight back or hold his own. Don’t worry, mate. We’ve done this drill before. We’ll keep you supplied. But get ready for a bumpy ride. It’ll be weeks before you’re civilized enough to be in the room with a live body and not be tempted to eat its throat and fuck the corpse. I won’t lie—for a gentle man, it will be damned uncomfortable. But you’ll learn. You’ll be a gentle man again. Just trust me, right?”
Marcus felt the lethargy take over, dulling the bloodlust, dulling the regular fuck-me lust, and he had enough wherewithal to ask, “Why am I so….”
“Sunrise.” Adrian embraced him gently, and then the sun did, and he wasn’t sure what happened for the next eighteen hours.
Adrian was right, of course. Marcus would learn that, in spite of his reluctance to lead like a general, Adrian was very good at leading a person to be the best version of himself. The next day, after Marcus had fed from Adrian himself—and the wounds had healed, and Adrian had fed from someone else out of Marcus’s sight—Adrian brought in a young-looking man, naked, as they all seemed to be in this room. Marcus had to admit it cut down on cleaning.
Adrian told Marcus to think about feeding, and suddenly his canines lengthened alarmingly. Adrian showed the same face to Marcus, and then, after asking the young man’s permission, he took hold of a tender wrist and delicately punctured a vein. The blood ran freely, and Marcus felt hunger stir in his belly.
Adrian told Marcus to do the same, and because he wasn’t voracious and desperate with it, h
e managed. The tooth poked, the blood spilled richly out, and Marcus clamped his mouth over the vein, suckling eagerly. The young man’s head fell back, and he sat naked between the two of them, writhing, groaning even when Adrian lapped at his wrist to close his own wound and Marcus continued to feed.
Marcus’s hunger wasn’t overriding anymore… or at least his hunger for food. Now that he wasn’t out of his head, the hard-on was a surprise.
But it wasn’t to his dinner. The boy—Marcus would find out later that he was older than Marcus; he’d been turned into a shape-shifter while still in his teens—took one look at Marcus’s arousal, took his healing wrist from Marcus’s dazed grasp, and bent his head, opened his mouth, and proceeded with a blow job so exquisite, Marcus was pretty sure he wouldn’t need sex for at least….
Another fifteen minutes.
IT GOT better. After a month, they let Marcus out of what amounted to a giant vault in the basement, where they kept new vampires locked up so they didn’t go running amok through the rest of the hill. Marcus had to admit—if Adrian had been a less skilled tutor, and if there hadn’t been a steady procession of warm bodies coming through his room nearly every hour, they might have needed to lock that thing on him.
Blood and body lust were not comfortable obsessions.
But it was a condition Marcus learned to live with.
A month after Gina had flown in front of Marcus’s car, causing him to swerve off Foresthill Road and down a gulley into a tree, Marcus was told to feed deeply and then taken to meet Green.
Green wasn’t human either—but he wasn’t a vampire, and he wasn’t a shape-changer, and for the first five minutes of their acquaintance, Marcus simply stared at him, blinking and trying not to be a fool.
Green had hip-length, butter-colored hair, astonishing emerald-colored eyes, and pointed ears.
Yes. Pointed ears. He also had a face that was almost a perfect triangle—wide-set eyes, wide cheekbones, pointed chin. He had attenuated fingers and toes (and bare feet), a torso that was unusually long and narrow (and no shirt), and was at least six and a half feet tall.
The look he gave Adrian was heavy-lidded with affection, and Marcus had to reevaluate everything he knew about this world—again.
There had been a steady stream of willing bodies through Marcus’s little vault, all of them male. Marcus, half-numb with his new, frightening drives, had simply assumed that this would be his life now—willing body after willing body. He’d even started to forget that he’d liked women when he’d been alive. He’d never been fucked into the mattress before by another man, and he’d certainly never sucked another man’s cock or fingered a tightened sphincter or fucked a willing ass or a willing mouth before his induction into the vampire world, but he found, when his mind cleared of the bloodlust, that he enjoyed these things.
He’d started a vague assumption that this was who he was now.
Looking at the unadulterated sweetness passing between Adrian and Green, he suddenly remembered the look in his girlfriend’s eyes when he’d finally made his move and kissed her like they would end up in bed together. He remembered the way she sighed when he was inside her and the way her little yelps of passion had made the entire world crystallize and shimmer with heat and desire.
He wasn’t aware he was weeping until he wiped his hand across his eyes and saw that it was covered with a mixture of blood and brine, and his vision was red with it.
They were meeting in the front room of the hill, which had a wraparound window overlooking a canyon silvered with starlight. Before Marcus could even wipe his eyes, the room was empty of everyone except Green.
“Marcus, is it?” Green asked gently, and Marcus nodded, beyond words. “Come here, Marcus. There are some things I’m not sure you know.”
The first thing that Marcus didn’t know was that making love to Green was like making love to sunshine on a summer’s day. For a vampire, it was both heartbreaking and precious to have that touch of warm flesh without the promise of iron-rich blood beneath. (The elves bled sugar-sweet ichor—it was the vampire’s equivalent of fifty-year-old scotch.)
The second thing Marcus didn’t know was….
Everything.
Green’s hill—Adrian’s home—was a commune, perhaps the only place in the world where every preternatural being in the world was welcome, and most gathered. Green was a sidhe, a high elf, the kind with all the power, but he wasn’t the only fey creature in the place.
In fact, the fey creatures outnumbered the vampires and the shape-shifters, and if you counted the tiny ones, the little sprites who mostly just looked like glowing lights unless you got close, and all the kinds of not-so-tinies, the pixies and nixies and brownies and gnomes and trolls and ogres and yunwi-tsunsdi (Native American pixies) and every other creature from folklore who lived there, the fey outnumbered the vampires and shape-shifters in astounding numbers.
And Green didn’t give a shit. They were all his children.
As Green’s flesh merged with Marcus’s that night, he didn’t fuck. He stroked, he touched, and he talked.
“Different than with women, mate, right?” he said, palming Marcus’s cock with a touch so fantastic Marcus almost came just then. “But you like women, and that’s good. So do I.”
That surprised Marcus. “Yeah?” he asked, arching into Green’s touch, his kind words, his complete understanding of Marcus’s complete confusion.
Green moved his head down and took a lazy swipe with his tongue. Marcus’s cock tingled, and something wondrous short-circuited that whole blood-fuck circuit in his body, and for the first time in ever, he just wanted to fuck. But not now. He wanted to talk to Green more.
“Absolutely, mate, and they’re one of the world’s wonders. Don’t worry. You’ll have a woman in your bed again, right?”
“Right,” Marcus groaned as Green used his mouth some more.
“And in the meantime,” Green said between licks, “you can practice being as good a vampire as you were a man.”
It was only as Marcus’s body washed hot and cold with orgasm that he remembered his girlfriend. She had already mourned him, attended his coffinless service, and was probably moving in with his parents to share their grief, and he’d been fucking and feeding without even thinking about her pain.
Green swallowed and wiped his mouth and then moved languidly to Marcus’s side. He pulled a tissue from the side of his big hand-carved bed and began carefully wiping Marcus’s blood-brine tears from his cheeks.
“I’m sorry, Marcus—I’m sure it was a lot to lose.”
Marcus nodded and took the tissue and tried to hold himself together. He failed miserably and ended up sobbing into Green’s arms until Green stood up, holding a hefty armload of vampire as though he were a child, and ran him down to the darkling, both of them as naked as day.
When Marcus awoke the next morning, he was starving, but not so hungry that he savaged the throat of the young shape-shifter who had been waiting in his room for the sunset. The young female shifter, he realized somewhat amazedly, as she all but purred and shivered in his arms.
It wasn’t until they’d brought the act of feeding to a natural—and mutually satisfying—sexual conclusion that he realized something else.
He was in a different room.
THE ROOM was one of the largest in the hill; Marcus was never comfortable having it to himself. Gina explained, not long after that first morning, that Adrian was trying to make him welcome. Gina had been a good person in real life but so unhappy in the human world that she’d been on the verge of self-extinction. Marcus was different—he’d been recruited by force. Gina had been distraught, and Adrian had felt bad for both the new vampire and her unintended victim.
The room was the hill’s way of telling him he had his space to be angry if he didn’t feel like fitting in. As Marcus grew more accustomed to Green’s hill—and to being a vampire—he found he wasn’t angry at all.
He was sad at first. When he was allowed out of t
he hill at night (and oh! the freedom of flying, the amazing roar of the wind in his ears and the peculiar cold wonder of the earth from two hundred feet in the air!), he took one opportunity to sneak away from the hill and go see how his family was doing.
He sat in the darkness below his parents’ window and listened with his new, improved, super vampire hearing, just to hear their conversation.
That wasn’t what he heard.
Yes, he heard their words and their sorrow… but he also heard their blood pounding through their veins, and even though he’d fed that night before he left, he wanted it.
He was appalled. For a terrible moment he was literally torn, half of him consumed with the alien urge to storm into his family’s home and devour them—rip their veins from their flesh and guzzle the blood as it pumped, hot and iron-oxygen fresh, from their cooling flesh.
He fought it. It took slow, stiff movements, and then, in the back of his mind, he heard Green’s words.
You can practice being as good a vampire as you were a man.
He took two running jumps and flew.
He confessed to Adrian later, both that he’d gone farther than he promised and that the compulsion to… to eat the people he loved had almost driven him insane. He and Adrian were not lovers—not on a regular basis, anyway. But Adrian had made him—had literally willed him to swallow, willed his brain to spark when there was no oxygen and no electricity, and the only thing driving his sentience was magic. There was a bond; when Marcus had become calmer and not needed to fuck or feed off anything that moved, he could sense it and realized it was what had kept him from losing his sanity in the first place. So on this night, instead of sex—raw sex, tender sex, any sex—Adrian had folded him up in a very brotherly sort of embrace in the few moments before dawn.
“Most of us can’t be trusted around our loved ones for over a year after we’ve changed,” he told Marcus seriously, his sky-spangled eyes intent. “Love can be an all-consuming emotion, brother. In our state, it takes some practice to separate the eating from the embracing—you were lucky.”